Establishing Identification Criteria for Botanicals
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ESTABLISHING IDENTIFICATION CRITERIA FOR BOTANICALS PETERJOHNHOUGHTON, BPHARM,PHD Senior Lecturer in Pharmacognosy, Department of Pharmacy, Kings College London, London, United Kingdom
Botanical identification is necessary to ensure efficacy and minimize any possible toxicity and may help in identifying possible contaminants. The identification of drug botanicals differs from that of living plants since the botanical is usually in a dried form and may also have been subjected to other processing procedures. Otherfactors which may present problems in identification are the loss of cellular material during preparation, intraspecific variation which exists in plants, and the methods by which features can be accurately described and understood by nonspecialists. Botanicals are identified mainly on their visual appearance either with the naked eye or microscopically. Such descriptions consist of verbal, drawn, or photographed features and a possible future development is the use of computer imaging. Other organoleptic characters such as taste and odor can be developed to give a high degree of accurate identification by individuals with long experience; however, such expertise is very difficult to transmit in a written form. The other major set of identification procedures relies on the detection of specific chemical substances in the drug in question. Thin layer chromatography is the most useful technique now used. Authentic specimens of botanicals should exist in collections which would be available for comparison with samples. These collections can be of living material or of preserved specimens such as herbaria used by botanists. Ideally, the preserved specimens should be in the form encountered commercially. Key Words: Botanical drugs; Microscopy; Macroscopy; Thin layer chromatography; Reference collections
INTRODUCTION THE WIDESPREAD AND increasing use of botanicals as food supplements and herbal medicines, estimated at 10% per annum for the period 1993-1998 in the United States (l), demands that immediate attention is paid to ensuring that adequate methods exist for the correct and unambiguous identification
Presented at the DIA Workshop “Botanical Quality: Workshop on Identification and Characterization.” April 9-10, 1996, Washington, District of Columbia. Reprint address: Peter John Houghton, Department of Pharmacy, Kings College London, Manresa Road, London SW3 6LX, UK.
of the plant material used in their production, that is, the knowledge that the correct species (and, in some circumstances, variety) of plant is being utilized. Classical monographs, that is, written standards designed to achieve this aim, can be found in the older pharmacopoeias for botanicals in current or previous use in orthodox medicine (2,3,4). The introduction of a large number of plant products from other cultures and parts of the world to the United States and Europe in the last two decades, however, has meant that, for many
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